Central–Eastern Malayo-Polynesian languages
| Central–Eastern Malayo-Polynesian | |
|---|---|
| Geographic distribution |
East Indonesia and Pacific Islands |
| Linguistic classification |
Austronesian
|
| Subdivisions |
|
| Glottolog | cent2237 |
The Central MP languages (red). (In black is the Wallace Line.)
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The Central–Eastern Malayo-Polynesian (CEMP) languages form a putative branch of the Nuclear Malayo-Polynesian languages consisting of over 700 languages. The traditional division of CEMP is into Central Malayo-Polynesian and Eastern Malayo-Polynesian. However, Central MP has never been demonstrated to be a valid clade, and Eastern MP is only poorly supported.
The Central languages are spoken in the Lesser Sunda and Maluku Islands of the Banda Sea, in an area corresponding closely to the Indonesian provinces of East Nusa Tenggara and Maluku and the nation of East Timor (excepting the Papuan languages of Timor and nearby islands), but with the Bima language extending to the eastern half of Sumbawa Island in the province of West Nusa Tenggara and the Sula languages of the Sula Archipelago in the southwest corner of the province of North Maluku. The principal islands in this region are Sumbawa, Sumba, Flores, Timor, Buru, and Seram. The numerically most important languages are Nggahi Mbojo (Bimanese), Manggarai of western Flores, Uab Meto of West Timor, and Tetum, the national language of East Timor.
The Central languages may form a linkage. They are for the most part poorly attested, but they do not appear to constitute a coherent group. Many of the proposed defining features of CMP are not found in the geographic extremes of the area. Therefore some linguists consider it a linkage; a conservative classification might consider CMP to be a convenient term for those Central–Eastern languages which are not Eastern Malayo-Polynesian (Grimes 1991). Languages in the east of Flores and nearby islands, such as Savu, have especially large amounts of apparently non-Austronesian basic vocabulary (Würm 1975), but all of the CMP languages appear to have a non-Austronesian substrate that sets them apart.
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